So i came across a poor soul that had done this and wished he had kept a backup of his MBR and it got me thinking “i could automate that,” because I hate to do something like this more than once. So I wrote a quick bash script to handle the issue.

#!/bin/sh

SAVETO=”/etc”

# Do ATA drives
for DRIVE in `ls -l /dev/hd* 2>/dev/null | grep -v [0-9]$ | grep disk | cut -d”/” -f3`
do
dd if=/dev/$DRIVE of=$SAVETO/mbr-$DRIVE bs=512 count=1
done

# Do SCSI drives
for DRIVE in `ls -l /dev/sd* 2>/dev/null | grep -v [0-9]$ | grep disk | cut -d”/” -f3`
do
dd if=/dev/$DRIVE of=$SAVETO/mbr-$DRIVE bs=512 count=1
done

Obviously, there is a whole lot that could be done to improve the script (error checking, user notification, overkill), but if you aren’t already backing up your MBR, start here. Throw it into a cronjob and forget it – cron.monthly not cron.hourly.

Download it here.